


Lay to Rest

by Brachylagus_fandom



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:35:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22513360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brachylagus_fandom/pseuds/Brachylagus_fandom
Summary: "I'm, ah, not that kind of doctor," the woman says.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2020





	Lay to Rest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).



When Miles shows up at his door with a young woman in Amestrian military uniform, Scar almost slams it in his face. They've had this discussion before; however useful the military might be (and however much they will need the Civil Engineering Corps to rebuild the cities), this first trip is not one for outsiders. He does not want their dead buried by some of the same people who killed them.

Then he sees the golden caucedus on her collar. He sees the mix of fury and determination in her red eyes. (He sees someone else, years ago, with the same determination, the same set to their shoulders.) He sighs and lets them in.

"Do you think we need more doctors for the first trip?" Scar asks. 

"I'm, ah, not that kind of doctor," the woman, scratching the back of her neck, says. "Medical Examiner Maryam Shepherd, Eastern Command Forensics Unit." She lowers her voice. "I specialize in skeletonized remains, sir."

Scar freezes. He's considered how they're going to deal with the dead, of course - they're about to set out to give them a proper funeral - but he hadn't thought identification possible beyond lists of the dead and fuzzy assumptions of who died where.

"You think you can…" Scar trails off. Maryam fidgets.

"Without identifying markers, not definitively, no," she says. "Especially not in larger towns. But it may make identification by family members easier. And I'm confident I could establish how people died."

"She's the one who identified Emma Martin last year," Miles says, "with nothing more than a single foot-"

"That's not really analogous," Maryam says in a rush. "We only find a couple bodies in the desert every year, not _hundreds to thousands in one location,_ and she was a dancer, so her metacarpals-"

"It would be an honor to have you assist us," Scar says. Maryam nods.

"It's what I trained to do," she says.

***

The first villages go like this: they arrive, sometimes warned by the remains of houses or someone's memory of where their hometown used to be along the Great Road, sometimes surprised when shards of bone appear under their feet. They spend the day gathering the bodies of the dead, arranging stray bones into partial skeletons as best they can. Sometimes, people wander the line of bodies, pointing to skeletons and their personal artifacts and saying "that's my father, his hand was trampled by a mule when I was a child - you could hear his swearing for miles", "that's my younger sister, she wore that necklace after our mother passed", "that's the town busker with his flute and bowl." Most of the time, no one is from the village or knows the people in it, so Maryam examines the bones and records their estimated height and age and anything found with the body and where they were found. Miles has a list (several lists, actually) of the missing: who they were, what they looked like, where they hailed from, what they kept with them, where they were last seen, who might be looking for them. (It's not a great list, both woefully incomplete and filled with living people who couldn't contact their loved ones, but it's remarkably good for the three months they had to assemble it.) Later, once the sun sets, he and Maryam will compare lists by lamplight, trying to match people to bodies.

They say funeral rites as they bury the dead, an endless litany of "The time has come for Your children return to You, Great Ishvala" and "let these brothers and sisters find rest within Your grace" and "we will remember these children of Yours until we cease to remember ourselves, and we will keep them in our hearts as long as we keep You in our hearts, and…"

 _(We should be using the dead's names,_ Scar thinks. He knows that they're using them when they can, that the monks have approved this, that replacing names with vague phrases like "brothers and sisters" and "children of Ishvala" is done in times of plague or natural disaster - and, while not in any sense _natural,_ the massacre is certainly the largest disaster to befall the people of Ishval in Scar's lifetime - but it still grates at him. _The dead need to have names in the afterlife. We should be using their names.)_

***

"Partial skeleton, may be female, probably between 17 and 25 years of age, roughly 5'2", golden locket around her neck," Maryam lists as she examines the upper half of a skeleton. "Cause of death is probably explosive trauma to the abdomen; I am going to be _so happy_ when we get to a town Kimblee-" she (and half the people in earshot) spits at his name, "-didn't go through first. Next skeleton, also partial - left clavicle and shoulder process, thoracic spine, and 13… this isn't a human skeleton."

"It's not?" Miles asks.

"Too many ribs," Maryam says. "Probably a goat based on the size, might also be a sheep or dog. Next partial skeleton, skull, cervical spine, left humerus, and right arm and hand, _actually human this time,_ indeterminate sex-"

They do not bury the goat with the human remains. (The part of Scar that fusses over not naming the dead in funeral rites is infinitely thankful for that.) However, as the day goes on, more and more people learn of the not-human-this-time bones, and more and more people who have spent the past month burying their brothers think it would be funny to give approximately a quarter of a goat a proper funeral.

A pit is dug and the bones are placed inside with all due haste, and seemingly half the expedition stands around it giving burial blessings.

"The time has come for Your child Billy-"

 _"Billy?_ You named it _Billy?"_

"My Nana called all her goats Billy. _Anyways,_ O Keeper of Fields and Flocks, please accept Billy back into your arms, for all animals fall under Your domain and protection…"

***

Scar isn't sure what he was expecting in his hometown. Maybe something like the less damaged villages they had already visited: skeletons left where they fell in a town still vaguely recognizable as a town. Or maybe a field of dust and rubble and bone shards like the one they left two days ago.

He certainly wasn't expecting the large mound just outside what remained of the town's wall. Or the remains of a large tent, its tattered white canvas fluttering in the wind. He knows what happened to the tent's inhabitants - he _is_ what happened to the tent's inhabitants - but it takes the air out of his lungs nonetheless.

"Probably a mass grave," Miles says as if there was a chance it could be a perfectly ordinary sand dune. "Miss Rockbell gave us her parent's patient records, so we probably know everyone buried there, and they're not exposed to the elements if you want to leave it for another trip…"

"We said we'd bury everyone," Scar says. _I need to bury my brother._ He clears the sand with a touch of his right hand - it's a skill well-practiced by now - and they get to work.

"Scar!" Maryam calls an hour after they started laying out bodies. "Male, late forties, right arm removed just below the shoulder with a bone saw." Scar carefully stands from where he's helping excavate the row of individual graves on the other side of the former tent (he thinks these are the bodies the Rockbells buried themselves; it's too close to the city to be a soldier's grave) and walks over.

At first, he can't see the difference (besides the missing arm) between the skeleton and any other they've found so far. Then he looks at the spectacles perched on the skull's face and the left hand's long, clever fingers, and he sees it. 

"It's him," Scar says. "That's my brother." Maryam nods, notes it in her journal (the seventh one she's used so far), and moves on to the next skeleton. Miles pats his shoulder awkwardly.

Scar buries him at sundown, after they've identified most of the bodies and laid them all to rest. Miles and Maryam watch as he makes a pit six feet deep (another skill well-practiced on this journey) and help him place his brother's body in it; neither of them comment when he places his brother's notes under his left hand. _(It's not that different from burying a monk with his staff,_ Scar thinks. _What a man alone makes and alone uses - well,_ meant _to alone use - exists with him alone._ His arms itch.) 

"Great Ishvala, we return Your child Ezekiel to Your arms," Scar says as they search for a gravesite marker. "Please let his body nurture the earth as his spirit nurtured ours in life."

"May his memory echo from the mountains down to the waste of the Great Desert and the fertile plains of the west." Maryam says. It's not a blessing Scar knows - the remembrance blessings he knows typically involve pledging to keep the person in your heart - but some part at the back of his mind recognizes it.

"You're from the north?" Scar asks. It's a reasonable guess that such a blessing would come from the part of Ishval with mountains. Maryam taps her name badge.

"Shepherd's Pass," she says. Scar and Miles both wince. "Mom and I left about a week before the second siege."

They leave town just before dawn two days later. The morning dew makes the rubble gleam in the early morning sunlight, and Scar swears he can see a tiny shoot of green on his brother's grave.

***

Five months into the expedition (and with at least another five months until their task is done), they stop on the road to celebrate the beginning of spring. It's a tradition Scar's people have clung to fiercely over the past decade, and in broad strokes, little has changed from the festivals of Scar's youth. People are dancing and singing to the quick beat of a drum; massive bonfires make the evening as bright as midday; there is food and drink everywhere in order to ensure an upcoming year of plenty; there are prayers for good luck and good fortune and good flocks and good harvests. The finer details are different - everyone is in work clothes, some of the songs are long-unpracticed and rough as people mumble through half-forgotten phrases, there are no children underfoot but rather dozens of mostly middle-aged adults - but it the overall effect still makes Scar's heart warm.

At sunrise on the day after the equinox, the remaining alcohol is doled out, and everyone is handed a glass. They toast the rising sun: "To the lengthening light! To the light of Ishvala that shines on us all! To the year behind us! And to a fruitful year to come!" Miles takes a sip from his glass and nearly spits it out.

"The _hell_ is that?" he splutters. Scar laughs for the first time in what feels like centuries.

"Fermented orache," he says. "What the sheep don't eat, we make into wine." Maryam hums; her face looks slightly sour, and she's already emptied her cup next to a nearby plant.

"In the mountains, we used fermented goat's milk," she says. "This is a bit strong for festival wine, though." If anything, it's watered down from what Scar remembers, but he supposes the north had different standards for this sort of thing.

***

They reach Shepherd's Pass a week before midsummer, when the temperatures in the plains are just starting to become unbearable but the high peaks are still brisk. Other than a few former trading posts in the far east, the mountains are the last part of Ishval they have left to visit; it's an inacessible region, filled with remote villages themselves filled with death.

Maryam freezes just before the last bend in the road that leads to Shepherd's Pass. A few yards before, she had been determined, perhaps even upbeat at the idea that their mission would soon be over, but as she recognizes features of the rock around her - _I used to walk along the top of that stone wall, we would pick fruit from that tree in high summer_ \- the weight of the situation dawns on her, and her veins turn to ice.

"M.E. Shepherd?" Miles says cautiously after she's been still and silent for a few minutes. She startles at the sound.

"What?" she asks, expression still dazed.

"Do you need to sit this one out? We can bury the bodies-"

"No." She takes in a deep breath and then another. "I'm trained for this. I trained for _this."_ Maryam squares her shoulders and starts walking forwards.

There are less than twenty unburied bodies within the town; Shepherd's Pass had always been a tiny village of, well, shepherds, militarily important only because it acted as a chokepoint in the trek over the mountains, and the lull of a brief ceasefire had allowed many of its residents to bury their dead and then leave before the fighting resumed. Maryam walks the line of skeletons, identifying them by sight rather than examination.

"That's Uncle," she says, pointing to a skeleton with a monk's staff laid beside it. "I'm sorry, I don't know his real name… Ezekiel and Elijah, twin brothers, their father lives in East City… Naomi the butcher, her parents died in the first siege…" At the next body, she chokes. 

"Your father?" Scar asks. She nods.

They bury them individually, with their names carved into their grave markers, and then they leave town. Maryam leaves small, round rocks and sprigs of clover on the graves; Scar adds their names to the list of the dead looping through his head.

Half a mile down the road to the next town, a nanny goat wanders out onto the road. "Probably feral," Maryam says, but it allows her to pet it with more grace than Scar has seen from domesticated goats in the past, and it chews the hem of her shirt almost calmly. "Should we keep her?"

"We shouldn't leave her out here," Miles says.

"What should we name it?" Dan, who's barely eighteen probably the youngest member of the expedition, asks. A grin crosses Maryam's face.

"Billy," she says, and Scar tries not to grimace. The name is quickly accepted, and they continue walking down the mountain as the sun sets, Billy the nanny goat and all.


End file.
